“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.”
~ The Nazarene escapes the rhetorical trap, as told in the synoptic gospels.
"Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine" ("I leave you free from both men")
~ Saint Marinus’s dying words, 366 AD
“Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”
~ Yogi Berra
Joel Bowman, seeking refuge on Monte Titano, San Marino…
We arrived just in time to see the sun setting across the ancient valley below… and on the summer season, too. It’s been almost four months since we left our home in Buenos Aires, Argentina, together with dear wife and daughter (8yrs), and embarked on our “Junior Grand Tour.” And what a summer it has been…
We’ve written to you, dear reader, from over half a dozen countries along the way… as we tracked the ghost of Franz Liszt through the magnificent Villa d'Este in Tivoli and genuflected at Raphael’s feet in Rome’s mighty Pantheon… battled the throngs in Petra, Jordan and floated on the Dead Sea in Israel… walked the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem and uncovered hidden oases in Greece’s Cyclades archipelago… ventured underground in Old Town Tbilisi, Georgia and endured the morning commute on Venice’s Canal Grande…
And now, on the final stretch, we look forward to unpacking our (carry-on) suitcases and reuniting with friends and family. But what did we see? What did we learn? How did we change? Hmm…
Many Suns Ago…
More than seventeen centuries of sunsets have passed since this town’s patron saint first laid eyes on its heavenly vista. Marinus (lit. “of the sea”) had earlier traversed the wine dark Adriatic, escaping Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians on his native island of Arba (in modern day Rab, Croatia, then under Roman rule). He first landed on the seaside town of Rimini, where the story gets a little fuzzy…
By the time Marinus “headed up the hills,” as it were, sometime around 301 AD, he was either (depending on which story you believe)…
…seeking the quiet refuge of a hermitage after a lifetime of noble service, offering succor to his fellow Christians down by the shore…
or…
…fleeing an insane woman who accused him, then a Deacon in the burgeoning Christian church, of being her estranged husband.
Either way, the cooling climes of Monte Titano, a good day’s ride inland, would have seemed a welcome refuge for the proto-social distancer. It was here that the man’s reputation for holiness and quiet sanctity grew, until his solitary meditations became so famous among the townsfolk below… that his followers decided it was time to join him.
Marinus was later gifted the mountain, canonized a saint and had the hilltop town, now one of the oldest republics on the planet and home to a crowd of 33,000 souls, named in his honor. Quite the quiet achiever, for a wannabe hermit…
Something of a rebel ‘til the end, Marinus’s mysterious last words appear to have been in keeping with his cryptic nature. “Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine” (translation: "I leave you free from both men"), is taken by some to mean “free of both Emperor and Pope.” The utterance, whether true or apocryphal, stands rather in contrast to The Nazarene, who famously enjoined his own followers to “render unto” both…
As for what we’ve learned along our journey, we recall that it was Heraclitus, that clever ol’ Ephesian, who once observed, “Man cannot step into the same river twice.”
Presumably, this is because both the man and the river have changed, for better or worse. In any case, further reflection will be required on both fronts… but not until we cover the final stretch, across Virgil’s beloved countryside, on to the ancient Roman port of Ostia, and across the azure skies to a New World, one our heroes never even knew.
Stay with us…
Cheers,
Joel
P.S. Have you already downloaded my latest novel, Night Drew Her Sable Cloak? It’s now available for Fellow Flânuers in our Books Section, here. Members also get my debut novel, Morris, Alive. And all upcoming efforts with the quill (I’m working on a third, pre-award winning novel presently)…
Support independent authorship for just a few bucks ($5.83/month, to be precise) and download Night Drew Her Sable Cloak and Morris, Alive right here…
Or, if you’d prefer to go “old school” and purchase a hardback copy, you can pick one up on the river of no returns, Amazon, right here…
A Modern Flâneur in... The World's 5th Smallest Country